Jenna Puts the J in J.Crew

"Thanks!" to Jessica, as well as OperaRach (in this post), who shared the following article from NY Mag (click here to read in its entirety). There are four pages to the article, so just a bit is re-posted here:

The J in J.Crew: How Jenna Lyons became the most unlikely of tastemakers (a word she detests)

By Molly Young

August 14, 2011



Jenna Lyons is physically demonstrative. If the creative director and president of J.Crew is baffled by a suggestion, she’ll make a baffled face. If she is shocked by the price of a Hans Wegner chair, she’ll pantomime a backward stagger. When a knit dress strikes her as drab, she’ll enunciate the word argh. Lyons is discerning, but she’s also six-foot-five in heels, and the fact that there’s an awful lot of her means that even the subtlest expressions come across loud and clear. ...



At another meeting, this one for the forthcoming fall catalogue for adults, Lyons sits two chairs to the left of her boss, wearing cream-colored jeans and a blue seersucker men’s shirt unbuttoned to several inches below her sternum. Drexler eyes his second-in-command between bites of a toasted bialy, then poses a question to the group of twenty executives: “How do we get more women to wear men’s shirts, like Jenna is wearing?”



“Show ’em a picture of Jenna,” someone says. This is a joke, but it’s also the right answer, and it hints at the power that Lyons has come to wield over the aspirations of young and youngish women. (A second hint: “Jenna Lyons girl crush” brings up half a million Google hits.) “Everyone from industry professionals to the younger generation of bloggers is crazy about her sense of style,” says Nina Garcia, the fashion director at Marie Claire. “Jenna has mastered the art of the high-low mix.”



The first thing you notice about Lyons—after her height—is that she doesn’t look much like anyone else in fashion. She has an emphatic jaw, flower-bud mouth, and warm eyes. Unlike many of the J.Crew employees’ dark tans, hers looks incidental, not cosmetic, and the overall effect is of a woman who knows the might of her presence and handles it carefully. This is an honest stance but also a complicated one, as I learn when Lyons casually mentions that all her teeth are fake. “I’m not at all shy about it,” she says of a genetic disease called incontinentia pigmenti. “I have quite a few scars on my skin, my teeth are conical”—hence the dentures—“and I have huge bald spots on my hair that are mostly closed up, but they’re still there.”



...Where feathers and sequins meet J.Crew is largely a matter of styling, and though Lyons dislikes the word preppy, her choices always invoke the core prep values of ease, cleanliness, and conservatism. If her company has always prized a kind of sartorial comfort—nothing too tight, too short, too synthetic—then Lyons, with her bare face and occasional bralessness, is what happens when comfort meets chic. ...

Whoever is the publicist for the executives at J.Crew, bravo! S/he needs to get a raise. The executive creative team & Mickey Drexler seem to get such great coverage in the media. And it does feel like they are everywhere.



As for the article itself, I liked it. By now, it feels like we know who Jenna is. But reading her quotes, especially about her scars and bald spots, makes her all the more sweet to me.



So I read with great interest the part of the article that said: "...now comes out fourteen times a year to the ardent scrutiny of blogs like...". I excitedly thought to myself, "Will the JCrew Aficionada blog be mentioned? A little recognition for this blog and the great community behind it?" Well... Nope. Nothing. {sigh} It's sad enough J.Crew ignores this blog, but et tu, Molly from NY Mag? :( On a happier note, congrats to RatsOnParade who did get mentioned! :)



What are your thoughts on the article? Any piece you found particularly interesting?



UPDATE: Check out the "Jenna Puts the J in J.Crew {and I heart JCAs!}" post for the follow-up to this story!